I just bought an old 1972 Merc 230. It’s a beautiful old car. The colour’s not right, and then engine sounds rough, however I love it and it’s a project that should keep me amused for the next 6-12 months at which point I will likely take it for a few laps of the block and then sell it to the highest bidder.

One thing that I realized though, is that this car is not something that I would rely on as a daily-driver. Yes, it has all the romance of the 70’s, however the ride is soft, the aircon doesn’t work and carpet is almost non-existent. The exterior noise is so loud the radio is useless and I couldn’t imagine driving down south, or even to work, more than once in a blue moon to clean out the carby’s.

For the daily stuff I like my Pajero. It’s comfortable, and the ride is quiet. The radio, aricon and electric windows all work. The power steering is effortless and I have four wheel drive at my fingertips. It’s fuel injected, so it starts first time every time and I can go on holiday for a month, come back and its starts again after not being turned over for that amount of time.

This got me thinking about business infrastructure.

Are your business systems a reliable daily driver, or are you running on some Vintage gear?

A great analogy for this story is a company car. You upgrade them every few years, they are maintained well, they get you around and you don’t really get too attached to them. This should be the same for your servers and computers. They should be leased every 3-4 years and upgraded with the latest technology you can afford so that your business benefits from it.

Reliability should cover everything in your business, and just think, like the car not starting in the morning, what happens if your PC will not start?

There are always affordable bundles available for people looking to upgrade their infrastructure, and there is always finance available to ensure that you can have it now, fixing your monthly IT spend and ensuring that you can smoothly upgrade again in a few years time. So here are some things to consider:

1. What do I need?

Talk to a professional, like Evolve IT, when considering an upgrade to your IT infrastructure. We can advise on what you need, the benefits of the new systems and what best way to use them and deploy them for you.

2. Brand matters

At Evolve IT we specialize in HP. Why? Because they make very reliable gear, and their warranty/ after sales service is impeccable; the best in the business.

3. Extend the Warranty

Extend the warranty to cover the term of your lease on the computers. This way, not matter what happens you are going to be covered as long as your payments exist.

4. Finance if you can

Why spend all your capital up front if you can lock in a good finance option and pay a small monthly on your purchase? Finance limits capital expenditure and maximized cash flow for the more important things like marketing and stock. This also enables you to upgrade at the end of the agreement and refinance with similar payments, ensuring that your IT is always cutting edge, without breaking the bank.

5. Join the RAC / RACV

Like a car, your computers will require call-out professionals to assist when things do go awry. The RAC (WA) or RACV (Victoria) are the choice for the company cars. As for your computers Evolve IT can help you, for a small monthly fee, to ensure that your systems are working well, are maintained correctly and are fixed quickly if anything does go wrong. Think of it like insurance, with RAC and mechanics all rolled into a simple monthly payment.

If you consider these simple things when you upgrade your company gear then you are going to limit the expense, maximize cash flow, ensure the highest quality of gear and guarantee that your after-purchase care is at a level that car lovers would expect from Rolls Royce.

If you have any questions, or want to arrange a time to meet, please let me know here.

Have a great week!

Mark Ehlers

In my 10 years in the IT industry I have seen some abominations of service. “Service” is a word that is used so flippantly by IT providers that it really should be investigated as to what you are really getting.

Some simple tips for auditing your IT providers:

1.       Survey your staff

At Evolve IT we recently had to renew once of our biggest contracts. The client had a new CFO and therefore she shopped around for a better deal to what we were providing.

Once the pricing came back and was about the same, the new CFO did a very smart thing: she surveyed the staff who we deal with every day to see what they thought of Evolve IT’s service and the people that provide it.

The result, needless to say, was good. The staff members were extremely happy with us and therefore there was no competition to the renewal of our service. So ask yourself the question: If you asked your staff what they thought of your IT support provider, what would the reaction be? Better yet, actually ask them and take the guess work out of it.

2.       Study your SLA

Your service level agreement is what you should be basing performance on at a scientific level. What is the agreed turnaround time for a job? What is the actual time logged?

At Evolve IT our clients are the most important thing. We have many opportunities to make more money through using our resources to do paid jobs rather than looking after our pre-paid clients, and here is where we differ from our competition: we don’t take these opportunities. Evolve IT managed Support Services clients are our only priority. We endeavor to serve our clients quickly and to the best of our ability to ensure that our clients never want to leave.

Is your provider making you a priority?

3.       Do you have an Account Manager?

Sometimes you just want to get someone on the phone. Anything can trigger this: advice, recurring problems or purchasing decisions. All of these things warrant a phone call to someone who knows you, knows your business and knows what the consequences are of bad decisions.

At Evolve IT we pride ourselves on providing an Account Manager for all of our Managed Support Services clients. Our Account Managers can provide you with guidance and advice on how to better, not only your network, but your business.

4.       Does size matter?

Evolve IT is a national company with 20 staff across Perth and Melbourne. With this size comes depth of experience and qualifications to ensure that our clients always have someone to talk to about specific problems that they are encountering.

Be it a project or simple service, expertise and depth ensures that it is completed quickly and to a higher degree of success than smaller “back yard” operators.

5.       What kind of infrastructure does your provider have in place?

Infrastructure management requires some very important tools on the providers side as well. There are so many jobs that don’t require a technician to come out on site if this infrastructure is in place. These jobs are often done remotely, if the provider has the tools in place to do so.

At Evolve IT we have invested more than $350,000 into our client services infrastructure  to ensure that all jobs are logged, completed and tested in the shortest amount of time possible.

6.       Vendor relationships

Does your provider have good enough relationships to get you the best deal possible on new hardware and software?

At Evolve IT we have very strong relationships with the large Vendors; Microsoft, Sophos, Acer, HP and Trend Micro. We have very strong relationships with the supply chain across Australia. This all enables us to get the best technology at the best price for you, the client.

So here are six things that set Evolve IT apart from the rest, and questions that you should be asking your boss, or yourself about your provider.

Let’s recap then and ensure you are getting the best service from your IT company. They should have:

1.       Positive staff encounters and service levels

2.       Be sticking to well within the SLA

3.       Provide you with an Account Manager

4.       Have the skills and depth to fix any problem that you encounter

5.       Have infrastructure in place to ensure timely and accurate solving of problems

6.       Supplier relationships that benefit you when you need to spend money

If you like the sound of a company that can give you all of this, then why don’t you contact me and we can arrange a meeting to discuss the possibilities.

Mark Ehlers

I have been reading heaps of books lately about accomplished sporting heroes, and one thing that they all attest to assisting them in their goals of world-wide acclaim is core strength. This is the muscles around your mid-section which give strength and poise to the rest of your body. If your core is strong, the rest of the body follows.

I know you’re asking what this has to do with IT, right? Well, lets have a look at your business. The arms and legs are your workers and their PC’s. The brain is the server and programs that you use, and the core is your network – your modem and all the switches,  firewalls and cables that keep you connected.

To enhance the way your brain operates you add knowledge through reading or education. You server needs processing power and capacity through chipsets and hard disk space. Like a boxer on the speedball to improve speed, your PC’s can get faster simply by adding RAM and using the cache. Imagine if it was that easy with your body!?!?!? I would just download some knowledge online and go to the store to have WWE superstar John Cena’s arms fitted. A fancy thought, I know.

Putting it in simple terms:

·         Einstein’s Brain = HP ML or DL server with Windows Server 2008

·         John Cena’s  arms = HP P Series workstations or laptops running Windows 7 Professional

·         Giselle Bundchen’s stomach = Good internet connection, quality modem and switches, high quality cabling, professionally specc’d wireless network, firewall to prevent attacks, antivirus to prevent viruses, business quality support and locking down programs to prevent abuse. See, it’s a little more complicated than the others…

So how do you strengthen your business core?

If you ask any fitness guru worth his salt they will tell you that balance and poise help to strengthen your core. Standing on a medicine ball, or balancing on a beam while doing other activities like catching a medicine ball.  With your network, this is the same – kind of…

Like balancing on a medicine ball, your network can be strengthened by balancing processing power, throughput speed, load and the programs that you allow to operate on it. No point in exercising your body if you’re going to eat burgers every day – similarly there is no point in increasing your throughput power if it’s just going to be used for people to look up video clips on You Tube or illegally downloading songs on Limewire.

At Evolve IT we do a lot of work with businesses to balance out the way that their network operates. Strengthen the core through good quality gear, and balance the load through ensuring that the traffic on your network is productivity based and not just Facebook and iTunes.

And like having a fitness instructor, Evolve IT can be there to personally train your business core to be the best that it can be. Unlike a personal trainer, who you only see once a week, Evolve IT can be on call all the time to ensure that your network is working out the way that it should be.

Backing up your data can save you from disaster. This is probably the reason that they call it “Disaster Recovery”, right?

This is true, and it makes sense.

So why is it that so many businesses balk at the price of good backup solutions? Given; some solutions are more expensive than others. Online is more expensive than USB drives, and tape is more expensive than Online; however they all have their merits and fit into their price points accordingly.

It seems to me that things in the office that don’t seem to have a day-to-day function are often neglected if you don’t have someone like Evolve IT managing your network. Backup is one of those things. You may have a 2TB storage device sitting next to the server that you cannot use (unless your server dies). You may have a tape auto-loader which cost thousands of dollars sitting there, seemingly doing nothing. You may have a bill for an online backup solution every month with no tangibility as to what you are being charged for exactly.

Backup is one of those intangible things. People think about it like a waste of money; however I am sure that you don’t consider the insurance on your car a waste of money. This is insurance on your business.

I won’t go into the different varieties of backup – this is not what this article is about. What I want to discuss is the opportunity cost. What is the cost of NOT backing up?

Just think about your business. Think about how many emails are sent in and out of the company all day long. Think about how may documents are stored on your server (where they SHOULD be stored) along with all the information stored on peoples individual computers (NOT best practice).

Now, think about what that information means to your business. All of those emails, documents, files, folders, and directories. All honed over time to work with your staff. All collected and collated and categorized.

Now think about one scenario:

You walk into work on a Monday morning and the server is down. You call your IT provider and they come out to investigate.

IT Guy gives the verdict: The server’s dead. Gone. To be buried. Call the priest.

Where is all your information now? I can tell you where – 90% of the time it’s in information heaven.

And even if your information is in the equivalent of a coma and can be rescued – how long is it going to take to retrieve it? It can take days or weeks to get your information back.

Can your business operate without any information, documentation, email or communication for longer than a day?

I must admit, I have clients who have said they can go three days. I don’t believe it and I think its wishful thinking on their part. I think in the real world most businesses would see 1 day as stretching it.

So lets look at the same scenario as before, however if you have a backup solution in place. You walk in – server dead – blah blah blah but instead of wondering how to get your information off the server, you grab a PC and the backup drive, hand it to your IT guy and say “get this going for us.”

In a couple of hours you can be up and running again. You can have a coffee, or a staff meeting in the time that it takes to get you back online.

This way you can work and your staff can work while the server is being repaired / replaced.

This is where the opportunity cost equation kicks in:

Cost of downtime for me + my staff + losing all of our information + losing all of our history

is greater than or less than

The cost of backing up our server

So how did you go? Is backup too expensive, or is your business too important? And would you only consider one option? I try to get my clients using more than one method, because, for the very unlucky, the server and the backup can go offline at the same time…

So, if you think that you can go a week without your email or information, then don’t bother backing up and take the risk.

If your businesses is too important to you to risk – then contact me and let’s have a talk about backup. Contact me on mark@evolveit.com.au or 0448 874 052.

Happy New Year!

I hope that you all had a great Christmas and a well earned break. I myself got married. So the break was doubly well earned, let me tell you!

But now we are back from the beach and into our normal lives. How many of you have wished that every day was a holiday? Many people do so don’t be ashamed if you said me, and this sees that people leave their jobs in search of a new life at the beginning of the year.

What does this mean for you; the business owner?

Apart from running ads in Seek.com and conducting dozens of interviews, it also means training someone and investing time and money into this training.

How easy is this going to be for your organization? The answer to this question varies, however there is one way to guarantee that it is as easy as can be…

Have everyone trained on the same system!

Standardized Operating Platform: This is generally the term used for a program that the whole company uses to run the business, from sales and marketing to customer service and accounts. If you are all using the same system, then there are going to be plenty of people around to train newcomers. It’s as simple as that.

a simple CRM system would suffice, and often leads to business improvements through increased sales or minimizing costs almost immediately

These systems come in the form of Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM) or Enterprise Resource Management systems (ERP). The difference between the two? CRM is customer focused and based on relationships, whereas ERP is process based and is often used in factories or warehouses and is accounting driven.

For most companies a simple CRM system would suffice, and often leads to business improvements through increased sales or minimizing costs almost immediately.

Increase Sales through better processes, opportunity tracking, more targeted marketing, easier lead generation and increasing repeat business through higher standards of customer service. Decrease costs through killing double handling, streamlining and improving customer service.

It really is that simple. If you want to help your business, start with CRM – and if you have CRM and cant seem to get the most out of it, give me a call here: http://www.evolveit.com.au/about-us/contact-us/.  I can help your business make the most out of your customer relationships and make life easier for your staff at the same time.

If you want more info please email me on mark.ehlers@evolveit.com.au  

Isn’t it amazing how you can find new things in the most ridiculous places? This is not one of those times, however I did find something cool in a place where I should have expected it… Google.

It just occurred to me that micro-blogging on twitter etc is going to be short lived and therefore we shouldn’t get too attached to it. However it’s not the microness of twitter that we like; it’s the ease at which we can be heard.

So why aren’t we using proper blogs and just making them easier to upload your info to?

I am writing this from my iGoogle page in a Blogger App. It’s great, a little small and has simple text editing functioanlity. So it’snot perfect.

You know why I like it?

It gives me the ability to blog at the drop of a hat and not have to actually go the blogger site to do so.

This brings me to my idea about great things.

My idea is that great things are those that enable you to do what you need to do without having to go anywhere to do it. You following me?

This is one of those ideas. I have twitter (probably not for long, but anyway), Facebook and Blogger all next to each other on the same page.

I can write this, post it and twitter and facebook status it without leaving this page. It’s incredibly convenient and will probably help keeping my blogs shorter, as even I can get a bit bored with my longer posts.

So here it is. There is heaps of free stuff available on the iGoogle homepage.

If you are not keen on iGoogle in your business, then lets have a chat about SharePoint. Email me at mark.ehlers@evolveit.com.au.

There are many different forms of computer support available these days, and this is no longer a linear equation of pre-paid hours and time based SLA’s. Whether you are a business owner looking for a new network support provider, or a provider looking to breathe new life into the way you service your customers, then you should read this article.

In the world of network support there is so much hidden stuff out there that the customer never sees that it’s important that we, as support providers, are alerting them to the fact that this service exists.

So what support do you need and what do you actually get?

1. Proactive Services

These are all the things related to the maintenance of the network. Proactive Services includes installing patches and upgrades, ensuring all monitoring is picking up faults and small issues that the client may not necessarily see and ensuring that backups is working and antivirus updates are being installed.

At Evolve IT we look at the amount of support calls required each month for a particular client and we analyse these numbers. If a client has an increasing number of calls due to failure every month, we look at this as a failure on our part. If this number diminished then this is good, as this means the client is experiencing more up-time.

“I am talking about genuine benefits based planning so that your clients can achieve actual goals…”

If the client is not calling this means that our proactive services are working perfectly by maintaining and maximising the up-time of the network.

As a potential managed support services client ask the vendors you are selecting what they do in the background and how they report this to you.

2. Account Management

Account Management is important for the client to get a handle on what it is that they are paying for. As stated in the last point, if we are truly doing our job perfectly then the client should never call.

But what happens when it comes time for renewal of the service? A client that is never spoken to will turn around and say “Well, we never call you, so we are not continuing the service”.

And there is no point in pulling out these figures only when you are bringing up the renewal of a service contract either - that is just bad service.

Monthly Account Management meetings are important so that your client knows what is being done in the background to ensure that they are experiencing the maximum up-time that they can from their network.

3. Network Planning

What are you doing to improve your clients network infrastructure?

I am NOT talking about selling here. I am talking about genuine benefits based planning so that your clients can achieve actual goals such as increase collaboration ability, hands free backup, or faster VPN connections.

These plans need to be done regularly and the client needs to know what is proposed to enhance the goal.

For example - if my client came to me and said “we need to have a space where we can all work on a document together and have a person in charge of it like a project” then obviously the suggestion is SharePoint, however this means nothing to the client.

But what if I said “there is a solution by Microsoft which enables the company to have their own virtual workspace called an Intranet. Everyone has their own site and teams can have sites too, like an internal website. Instead of having products on these pages though, each one is a workspace which enables more than one person to work on a document at the same time and a moderator who can approve changes and control document versions as well”?

This is less techie, enables the client to actually understand what I am talking about and I am not selling them a product - I am providing a solution to a problem.

4. Business Planning and Advice

Noe this is something that you can offer your clients if you have savvy people as Account Managers or business owners that meet with the clients regularly.

At Evolve IT we have business planning meetings with our clients to ensure that we are working with them towards their business goals. If there are ways that technology can help the client move forward then we can suggest and scope and the client can budget this into the business plan.

“Now the receptionist can also have a business building capacity part time and the business isgoing to see immediate advantages and long term cost saving and improved revenue as aresult of one little change”

For example I have been working with a client recently who has been using an old custom built Access database to capture their customer information over the last few years.

This client wants to become more efficient and have their staff increasing productivity without increasing wages or hours worked. Looking at the processes involved in capturing information it became obvious to me was that they need to breath new life into the way that they capture the customer data and use it within the business.

So now we are moving to an improved Customer Information System which is going to automate processes and leave more time for the staff to do their jobs. Now the receptionist can also have a business building capacity part time and the business is going to see immediate advantages and long term cost saving and improved revenue as a result of one little change in the technology behind the way that they work, not changing the way they work itself.

This is what I see as the difference between good service and fantastic service in the field of IT support. Layers of support, not merely restricted to computers and switches, but an investment in the business of the people we are supporting. If we help all of our customers grow, then they will always be our customers.

If you want some more information on this, just flick me an email

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I come across the results of bad or misguided advice a lot in my position at Evolve IT. Many times this amounts to people spending a heap of money on things they don’t need in order for someone else to validate their worth to a client, or to turn a potential client into a fiscal business transaction.

It kind of gets to me that these companies are obviously so interested in looking after the “now” that the later just doesn’t come into the equation.

Let me explain this by using an example:

A customer that I work with needed a customer information system a couple of years ago and they asked their IT guys what they should do. He obviously had some knowledge in this area and developed a system for them based on an Access database so that they can track this information.

over the last few years this project has had many iterations and every time something needs to be done for them, it costs them a couple of thousand dollars. The “solution” to their problem ties the developer / IT guru to the company for as long as the system exists and gives the company very little room to naturally evolve their systems as their processes evolve.

Now, an alternative solution here would have been a simple CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system whereby the IT guru could have outsourced to someone that really knows these things and provided them with a long term solutions from a variety of possible vendors, not just fixing the immediate with the limited knowledge that he had on this field.

There are a variety of solutions available in this genre of business application varying from free and open source (Free CRM) to paid (SalesForce.com) to premium (Microsoft and Siebel). Instead of reinventing the wheel here, the solution could have been based on something that had a roadmap for the future and, therefore, room to grow with the company. The solution that the customer ended up with simply paid the IT guru to develop it and maintain it for all these years, without giving back the benefits that an equivalent financial investment in a best-of-breed system would have given over the years.

So from this example, I want to explore the concept of advice in IT:

Are you getting the right advice?

obviously when you are looking at implementing something, or your IT guru has highlighted an area for improvement, then you are going to go to the people that know your network best - your IT guru(’s).

I am not implying shopping this work around, as when you trust your guru they are also going to do the best by you.

There are a couple of ways of ascertaining as to whether you are getting the right advice from your IT professional:

1. Have you been presented with a number of alternatives?
2. Has the solution worked for other companies like yours?
3. Has the solution got both short term and long term goals?
4. Has the provider got a solid list of reference sites in the same area of expertise?

If you can answer yes to all of these filtering questions, then your IT guy is doing the best by you.

If not, then you should seek some impartial advice and contact me so that we can catch up for a chat.

I have been hearing a lot about scams and the like recently and it has prompted me to think about the whole “buying online is cool” thing and wonder if there are some idiots out there that are going to ruin the whole thing for us law abiding folk?

Now if you are wonder what in God’s name I am talking about, I like to call it the “Pub Quotient”. This is the ratio of idiots to normal people at the pub. The idiots are the ones that smash glasses, cause fights and ruin everyone else’s evening. Now on the web the ratio I would expect is even smaller than the pub quotient which I rate at about 2%. I reckon the web may be a hundredth of that. Yet they affect a whole lot more people in a more sinister, intrusive and criminal way.

Who are “they”? “They” are the people that create viruses, install spy ware, and try to skim your credit card details. “They” are the types of people that can type faster than me and would definitely kick my butt in World of Warcraft. “They” are the types of people that you’d love to lock in a room with yourself just so you can teach them a lesson… right?

Wrong!!!

“They” are sophisticated criminals that have honed their art, are often affiliated with terrorist organisations and are so powerful that, often, they are not caught. “They” can earn millions of dollars in a day by stealing from the innocent in ways that can both devastate and also not even be noticed. “They” can skim a dollar from your bank account, and a million others and keep doing this daily until you notice. Have you checked lately?

So what can we do about this?

Cyber-criminals are the new train robbers, and like trains had to employ more guards after Ronnie Biggs, so does the every day Internet user need to up security to fight the threat. The threat now is global, as we let the world into our offices, bedrooms and lounge-rooms through the web. The world sits with you at lunch and talks to you while you watch TV or listen to your iPod at night. We have let this into our lives without really analysing what we are doing.

Much like a stalker watching his victims for visual pleasure, cyber-criminals have information as their vice. They get information by hiding things on your PC watching you. They don’t watch you physically; they watch your fingers, what you type, sites you go to and usernames and passwords that you enter. It’s that simple.

They can even use your PC to do the dirty work for them in something called a “denial-of-service” attack. By installing certain programs on your computer they can use your PC, without you even knowing, to bring down sites, and on occasion entire networks.

This was seen on ABC recently when the Federal Police were digitally incapacitated by a cyber attack on their network so large that it took down the BigPond network across Australia’s east coast. For these types of attacks unwitting pedestrians’ computers are used, without their knowledge or consent.

The best thing to do to fight these threats is to install anti-virus from a reputable company so that you are protected and so that your computer wont be used against others in these denial-of-service attacks. Sophos Small Business Security Solutions 2.5 is a fantastic place to start. Sophos’s products have earned them awards and accolades from large independent testers such as InfoWorld, Virus Bulletin and SC Magazine. You can see the full credit’s here http://www.sophos.com/products/reviews/. This is important. To be tried and tested and succeed against others in the land of independent testing is a massive honour, and one held by few companies globally.

Sophos Small Business Security Solutions 2.5 is Antivirus, Spyware Removal and Client Firewall all in one. There are three levels, so it caters for all budgets. The basic level includes automatic updates, 24/7 support and works on PC, Mac and Servers.

If you would like for us to give you a demo of Sophos Small Business Security Solutions 2.5, just contact me by clicking here.